 Well, thank you all for joining us we're here today to talk about how to leverage technology tools on your legal services projects. I'm Ali Smith and I'm from just tech and I'll be moderating our panel of speakers today. And I will pass it off to each of our speakers to introduce themselves so Tim I'll hand it off to you first. Awesome. Well, thanks for having us Ali. It's so I'm the technology innovation manager at pro bono net. I manage a involved in a few initiatives one involving crime victims and other other justice, and also helping to head up the, the now two year of reimagining of law of New York, which is just launched about a month ago and which we're still refining over the next three months or so. It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much, Tim. Molly, do you want to introduce yourself. Yeah, hi, thanks Ali. I'm Molly French. I work as the technology manager at Colorado legal services. In Denver, I started. I've been with the organization quite a long time which you'll have to send me some money for me to tell you how long. Anyway, it's been great. I've seen tech evolve from, you know, just the beginning where we all thought it was wonderful and it was to have websites to all of the innovative things that are happening now so, so I'm happy to be here as well. Thanks so much Molly and satish. I'm, I'm satish nori, I'm the executive director of a tech justice nonprofit called just fix based in New York City. I'm also an admitted attorney, although I don't like to admit it all that much for 20 years I was an attorney at legal aid which is a legal services organization in New York City. I did all kinds of things, but I always had a keen interest in using technology to leverage the power, the resources, the scope, the reach of our services. And so about four months ago I left my job as a lawyer to become part of just fix and just fix helps tenants use technology to try to achieve housing justice in short. So I'm very excited to be here. Thank you all. That's great. Today we're going to talk about how to leverage technology to enable collaboration on your legal services projects. And we have a great panelists speakers to bring their perspectives from their work managing projects within the public interest world. One thing I want to do to tee up the conversation is to think about what are the goals of collaboration to know how to use these technology tools to enable those goals rather than just an amorphous collaboration. So some basic goals to think about are you want to enable full participation of those working on the project, you want to make sure that there's mutual understanding from all stakeholders and staffers of the project. You want to make sure that the solution you're driving towards will be an inclusive one, and you want to have shared responsibility with all the stakeholders as appropriate. And so we'll be talking about how to achieve each of these goals with technology on your projects, but it's helpful to also conceptualize the project lifecycle. So we go into detail about this on the project management toolkit, but here's one way that we're conceptualizing the project lifecycle. So it starts with initiating the project. Once the project's initiated, then you plan and set up the project, then the team works the project, then you track and monitor and maybe re-plan the project, and then finally you close it. So using that conceptualization, I'll hand it off to Tim to start about what technology tools he's using when he's initiating projects. And I'm going to kick it off with the focus on collaboration for this. It's not a massive project management webinar. I think there's some other project management webinars on the LS&TAP website, and you can get a lot of really great tips from that, but we're focusing on collaboration. And for my part, I'm talking about the sort of initiate and plan stage. And when you talk about collaboration, I feel like there are two key project management governance ecosystems that you must set up. The first is you must identify roles and responsibilities, and the second is you have to create a robust communications plan. And as project managers, I wouldn't say it's a thankless job, but it's a difficult job, but it's also a very rewarding job. You get something done, and you see the results of all of your efforts. But if you don't have a roles and communications plan in place, then all of that falls to you, because you are ultimately responsible for everything. So I'm going to share my screen. Let's kick off. I want to do sort of a show and tell as we go along. Okay, you should be seeing a document or a web page called clarifying responsibilities with MoCA. So whenever you are, so the first part I want to talk about is about roles and responsibilities, and not just roles and responsibilities, but accountability within those roles. And when you start a project, you do need a framework for identifying those roles. And a few years ago, I discovered this, and I've implemented it in a few projects that we've managed, and it's proven to be really, really successful. So MoCA stands for manager, owner, consultant, helper, and approver. So within each of your project, you can imagine a wide range of stakeholders, right? You have stakeholders who are internal. You have stakeholders who are external. And think about all of the users that you have to manage, right? These personas that you have to manage. These are all potential stakeholders in your project. And so, instead of going through each of these, I'll talk about them as we go through the, so how do I get this? Oh, there we go. Okay, one of, let me start with requirements. So a staple of every project is coming up with requirements document. If you don't have the correct requirements, that project can go off the rails in several ways, right? It will expand the scope because you didn't identify all of what needed to go in for any one particular section of that project. It can, obviously, it can expand the cost, and it can expand the time it takes to get that completed. So this is not a requirements document. It's very, very expensive, right? You have to break it down into all of its individual parts. So what I'm doing here, and I don't know if you, if this sort of bar is blocking anything, but I'm going to put it at the bottom. This is a bar that pops up for Zoom. So I've decided that I'm going to create a brand new project, and it's called, you know, LS ENTAP puts on so many webinars that, hey, how about if we automate the process a little bit, right? So how about if we create an LS ENTAP webinar planning app, right? So this is sort of an intake app. And what does that involve? So you have to think about all of the requirements, all of the different steps that involves it. It can be before you could even identify roles. So you think, okay, I need user research, I need some program folks, I need some product folks, user research to determine what it is that you need, right? And going down a little deeper, what are the questions that you need to ask on this sort of triage tool or interview app, whatever you want to call it, this guided interface in order to produce an output, right? Which is next. Then what does that design look like? What software do we use to build out this interview tool? So after that tool is built, you have to do some QA testing, some usability testing, who does that? And then beyond that, you launch it, and now you're thinking support and maintenance of this tool. So once you determine all of these features and all of these segments of a project, then you have to think about who is going to be involved in each. And those become your stakeholders, and then you have to identify roles and responsibilities, and as importantly accountability within each of these roles. So you're going to create something like this. So here's that MOCA model, right? Manager, owner, consultant, helper. And manager is usually the project manager, right? If you're the project manager of this project, this application for webinar intake project at LSNTAP, so you are the LSNTAP project manager on this. On the other side, if you're hiring a developing development shop to manage to build out of this, you do need to identify a project manager on that side, because they will manage their team and how they develop this application. The owner is usually, let's say the director of that section or that program, who supports the project manager. Sometimes project manager might say, go back and say, look, I'm having this issue or I'm having that issue. You know, I think we might need to do another scope of work just for this little part, because I don't think the project will be sufficient without it. So the owner gives that feedback and takes ownership of those recommendations. A really critical part of this is, in terms of roles and responsibility, is the consultant role. Because think about it, you're the project manager. You have enough information and enough knowledge about all of these different aspects of a project that you're able to make, like, informed decisions about who to engage or the kinds of questions to ask, but not enough to make the final decision on design and product and those kinds of things. So you do need, within either your organization or elsewhere, consultants who you access on specific items to give you feedback. If they take ownership of that, you're like, okay, I am assigned off on this. This is where we're going to go. Right. You have to have your, you have to trust them. And in this role, they will take that responsibility. However, are the folks that actually going to do the work, right? So the quality assurance testing, the usability testing, creating these, this framework for doing user testing and usability testing, and, and, and, and, as you can imagine, many other roles. So this is sort of a, a, a small sample of potential roles, right, or, or identifying, identifying folks in these sections or these categories of roles. And finally, you have who might be the executive director who might be a funding partner, you have someone who actually approves all of this. Yep. You can go for that. Yes, you can go for that. Oh, I have a question about this. Right. So, so this is, this is precisely what you need. So if you notice, though, there's one thing missing from here. Right. Can anyone guess, like, there's a role in this thing from here. And so we talked about a developing development shop, right to build out this application. But we also talked about the, the software that we're going to use. So let's just say you're using community, let's say, the neurologic or some other tool like that, you'll need a role for someone at that software developer to contribute to this project. I assume for this project that the development shop is doing both, right, they're both developer of the, of this application, but they also own the software for helping us to develop it, right, that will be, that will be used as the basis for this. Any questions on roles before I move on to communications. Okay. Communications. I, I've, I've tried to hone this over the years. And anything that's too complicated is not going to be adopted. Right. So I try to, I try to keep this as, as, as sort of streamline as simple as possible. You need a communication goal, you need the tool to use that sort of communicate to achieve that goal. And then who are going to be involved on your team in each of these development in the each of these communication sections, and then how often are you going to have it. So for the development, this is the primary, let's say project manager, project manager, you have a weekly cadence, you're going to do it on zoom like we're doing this webinar on, and then you have a project updates to the stakeholders to your internal stakeholders to be identified all of those roles. Those stakeholders, if you don't have a monthly and trust me this is through trial and error over the years, but if you don't have a monthly update to the stakeholders to the approvers to the managers, then, and to the consultants right all of these are involved in this monthly project update. So this is where you get to update folks, not just on the development, but on funding on scope on issues that you might be having getting feedback from certain team members, or, or some issues that you might be having with the development shop and you're like look back on something specific. This way they're all in all, not just involved, but understand where we are in the process and understand and can give us feedback based on that understanding. Another is having a, like a quick and fast communication so whatever it is that you use for your internal communications, we have to use slack. So slack is really important for immediate feedback. Right, if you start an email chain, and it goes back and forth and back and forth, and then all of a sudden you want to involve someone else, it becomes very cumbersome. So slack is a really good space for this. You, I mean, and you'd be surprised some people say look if you use slack, you can go off the rails really quickly, pinging pinging pinging all the time. And you identify how to use it really meaningfully and really narrowly. Then you do need a tool where you can manage all of the information that you're gathering right it could be something that you got from email it started with an email thread. It could be with a slack thread. It's something that you got through a meeting with the internal stakeholders on that monthly meeting. It could be something that you had in conversation with the project manager on the other side. So you do need and we use base camp and I'm going to show you really briefly and in about two minutes about how we use base camp and how you can use it to. And then finally, you may, you may use to gather with the project manager on the other side member there are multiple project managers, typically on a project that involves outside stakeholders and certainly if it's a development shop is one of those stakeholders. So that's communications any any any questions on that before I go to base camp to wrap up this portion. Can you hear me? Yes, of course. For like a group that would be new to slack. Are there any practices that you would hold for a team who doesn't have a culture to fold into the slack norms of communication. That's a good question so slack. The reason why people think that slack can quickly go off the rails because it's an open communication platform and everyone. There are the way but the way slack is organized. You can, you can create closed groups and open groups. So let's say at your at your office your, you want people to know when everyone's off. You can create a PTO group of PTO channel, right and everyone is, every time someone's off or it's going to be off, they can let you know or you could create a water cooler channel where you exchange pictures or do whatever it is that you would do if you were in the office and exchanging casual conversations, but for something like this you would create a closed channel. So you would only have maybe 58 people whoever your internal stakeholders are in that channel, and that will keep it very focused and narrow. I think that's really helpful too. Yeah. All right, so I know I don't have a ton of time in this in this section so I'm going to go over the base camp. Now there are a lot as you could well imagine there are a ton of tools that you can use for managing projects if you go to capterra is a really great technology review that I like so it's capterra I think. And if you put in in project manager I haven't done that in a while but you probably get hundreds, right of tools. Like I said earlier, the, the, I feel like a primary like, if not the number one barrier to the adoption of any new tool or process is complexity. The one thing I like about about base camp is that it gives you the tools that you need, but not more. Right. Sometimes you'll sit back and say you look I wish I had this that and the other, but if you had that it would add complex complexity to this tool. The other part of it is that all communications in this program in this in this space are also send via email to everyone in that project. So you never have to even log in here if you don't want to, because you're getting the communication via email, you can even respond to that communication via email. In here I have some of my projects, these are just a few of them in this particular base camp space. Not just for my projects like crime victims legal help, or the law help New York rebuild, or, you know, when we hired a marketing consultant for a little bit, but my check ins with my team, right. Sometimes I look to prepare for the check in, do you have any, any, anything you want to share before that. After the check in, I can put the meeting notes there so for the next check in, we have something that we can reference right. If I go to a conference or if I go to a webinar, I mean like, oh, I want to take some notes. And you know they're all over the place when you take notes right. So here, I'm able to just create a conference note just for the Alice and tap webinar on a app to make webinars in webinar and takes even easier. So another part, another thing I use it for is for like a knowledge base. So if I am, let's say I'm going back and forth with Satish on a on something between just fix New York and law help New York. And we have, I have so many questions and I'm like, Oh wow, light bulb moment or here's the process that we went through. I can put all of that information within a space in base camp. And I have something to refer to about a what what just fix is doing and what law of New York can can how we can work together on something that I can reference every time we have that conversation again. Right, so that's sort of that. That's how I use that as a knowledge base, but we'll quickly quickly create a space here so that you have an idea of what is available here. And create a new project here called LS and to project webinar. So long one. Yeah, you can you can use a description here I create that project. These are the different modules that you can choose to have as part of this project. There is a docs and files module which this is where you file your your documents. There is a to do module which is great not for always putting a calendar event on there are a calendar notification on there. So you keep track of some of your project to do is and then you can then attach whoever is responsible for that to do, or tag them in that to do. So they're aware of it they get an email they get an email reminder. Here's a message. The message board is where is the thing I love the most about this this is where all of this, this, the communications happen. So, you know, like, to use the teaching and, and my conversation that's an example, I could say, you know, coming out of that conversation with just fakes, and I see and, and, and, and law of New York. There was this really interesting intersection of a project that we might be able to do together. And then I'll do a message on that right just just fix just fix and this new project, and then I'll teach will automatically be notified on on by email he could log into here, reply by email and then we have an email chain that becomes a bit of a knowledge base around that specific thing around that project. Campfire I almost never use campfire is like slack. And I don't highly recommend it because if you already have your internal, like fast communication tool why, why employ another one. You can, you can schedule things. I don't use this very often. This is really cool. Just as a, like, as an aside. If you have a project, or if you have a program, right that you're managing or that you're a part of, you might want and they're five people on the team. A great automatic check in would be, what are you working on this week, and every Monday at 10 o'clock, you they will get everyone on the team will get a prompt that says what are you working on this week. And, and then you just, and then when you answer everyone gets an email about what you're working on, because what that does, it allows you to say look, you know what, I, I have some information on that let's talk, or, hey, I was going to work on an aspect of that let's have a meeting and work on that together. It's really cool it just keeps you informed. So, let's just go ahead and just accept all of this. So, all, all of the, the different segments, then I'm going to add some people. I'm going to add myself on another email. So I'm going to. So this is my law in New York. Email, and then the project. And then I go to the project. And I start with a message board. I could say, um, interview questions. Right, so that's the, that's, that's the, the, the feedback loop, I'm going to get on this. And I could say, you know, take a team. Take a look at the attached questions. We got from users, please provide feedback. And then I post it. And when I post it, I could choose who to notify if I had 25 people on here which is not a good idea. I could just choose the five people I want to be notified automatically it chooses everyone, but then I could just choose who to be notified so then I post a message. And then with that message, I could post a link to a document. I could, I could include a PDF of a document, or a word document, or an image file anything I could have included in there. When I do that, then I get the, you get notified because you're on that team. Right. Right, so I'm now part of that, that that project. But I also get notified about this interview question. And in this email, I can either respond to this email and it would automatically be posted as a comment, or I can respond in base camp, I can click on base camp, and then respond, we're not logged into that. And then I could respond directly in base camp. Right. So, so this is base camp in a nutshell there's so much more I can go into on base camp and if you know if you ever want to know more about how I use base camp or, or sort of the intricacies of base camp, please like feel free to contact me happy to share what I know. The cost is I think $99 for per per organization for as many projects as you want. And I think there, no, there is a nonprofit pricing, which is even less than that so it's a really really great deal. I'm going to stop there because I know we I'm passed it on to Molly. But if there are any questions again I know that that if you don't have any questions on this on this particular call. If someone's viewing this later and want wants to shoot me an email to T Baron a pro bono that that happy to answer any questions. I really like mocha acronym. It's super simple and just really straight to the point so. So next time I order a mocha. I'll think about you. Okay. Yeah, thank you that was really informative I took a bunch of notes I actually used to use base camp, but about four years ago we stopped using it and it just looks like they've changed the whole interface so it looks really, really modern now. Okay, so what I'm going to talk about today is the next part of project management which is executing or can you guys see my screen okay always like to check in. Okay. Or, you know, doing the work as they say but you know let's not negate. Oh, I'm going to turn my video off because of the bandwidth thing. Okay, so, um, so yeah executing doing the work I really think that it's that's unfair to say that because initiating planning is so important. Also monitoring evaluation closing. I don't know about you guys sometimes I totally forget to close a project and tell LSE reminds me we have a report to you. But executing is basically if you look at all the steps and this is straight from a book by Rita Mulcahy. She's one of the experts in project management. If you look at this column, you'll see most of execution is you know of course producing your deliverables, gathering performance data but it's really about iteration and communication. You know so that's basically what executing is over and over reiterate get feedback reiterate, make it approved changes issue logs, I think are really helpful when you're launching a product. We used Google Drive years ago when we transitioned to legal server and we had an issue log and we prioritized our staff, you know, desires based on the, the effect, you know, the best effect they would have on all staff. For the most part, that's how we prioritize so we used a lot of different tools when we did did our legal server transition but basically in project management executing is of course producing your deliverables so putting all your plans and your, your initiating your project putting all of that into into play. The, the other, the thing I wanted to show you all as far as applying these communication tools and I can see who's on the presentation I think you all are well schooled and and all of this so please speak up if you have any ideas or want to share anything that you've done. So one of the projects we create we finished during coven which I have to say was kind of a feat only because we had stakeholders in India, England, and up at Boston University but we created a tool to help familiarize people going to court for the first time or people going to court without an attorney what they might bump into at the court and what resources are available. So the really interesting thing. Well, as far as creating that tool and executing the work, you know there were different aspects to the project like photo shoots, which of course had to be done in person during coven. So there were a lot of different aspects to the project that we really needed to collaborate on but we couldn't do it in person as we had planned because of coven so we had to shift to more creative ways of getting the work done. One of the things we did for the photo shoots we did go out to a courthouse and we were fortunate enough to have one of their staff who was really engaged with the project, but our director of photo the photo shoot participated over zoom on somebody's iPhone they were hanging around their neck while they were working with the photographers and the actors. So we had, and then we are also talking through what's at to the photography director to Dan Jackson at the new law lab at northeastern. During the photo shoots, we use Google Drive for our, you know, sort of our portal for all of our materials. So if you I won't dig into this too deep but the phases are our product almost match the project management steps but if you go into any of these you'll see there are just a lot of sub folders and then sub folders and then the folders and files of all of the content that we used to create the tool so Google Drive was a lifesaver especially during during the time where we couldn't spend time in person. So the team was located all over if we didn't have what's up that would have been difficult as well if we didn't have a good sense of the time in India the time on the east coast our time. We had to get all of that sink and coordinated to complete this project but we did it. I feel really good about it now we have to get more into the monitor and control phase which is more gathering feedback and making adjustments to the tool and continuing to do outreach and things like that. Another tool that we completed pre COVID was a chat bot and you can see it on the bottom of our website it's for consumers who have debt issues but don't have access to an attorney or don't really know where to get started or maybe even need some introductory information to understand what's happening you know with our debt and collections. So we also used a lot of collaborative tools to make the chat bot. The different project steps were like develop developing the scripts and the paths for the the bot. There are many many iterations of that developing and testing the bot engaging our stakeholder statewide. The vendor was Tom Martin in Canada I don't know if anyone's heard about him that he is a lot of bot work and then when the bot went live how to promote it. We also use Slack for that. This mind mapping software again like Tim said there's so many different software options. You just have to find the one that works for you. This is one of our scripts for one of the paths in in the bot. So this is just one out of five different scripts that are at the time are it was an ATJ fellow which was amazing but we used Bubblis and then you can share the mind map you can have other people editing it. I know it's hard to see the text but I don't want to get too too deep into it. But this is one of the tools that we use now I know there are a lot of different mind map tools out there now this one's been around for quite a while but it's really inexpensive and easy to use and we always look at those two things. We also use bro six at the time I don't know if any of you have ever heard of that that was pre teams and pre other I am Slack and other I am focused apps. We did of course have to do some in contact, you know, some in person meetings to create buy in with our stakeholders so our law intern actually traveled and did a lot of in person work as well. So it's not all about the technology but of course it's a critical part of all of them. Our current projects are we're doing a phone system upgrade. We are just at the beginning of that just gathering information basically about different phone systems and talking to different programs and talking about what works for them and you know getting reminders to think about, you know, uptime and you know not only user interface but cost and total cost of ownership, so many different things but anyway we're just in the thick of the planning and initiation phase of that but we're using some other tools like SharePoint and of course, Excel and Word documents and SharePoint and teams are teams and this works a lot like Slack I think in that you have teams groups and you have channels in your groups and you can invite external people to your meetings and all of that but I did want to show you in SharePoint. For example, in our post, sorry, in this folder, I have set up some additional columns in SharePoint and I'm not sure how many people use SharePoint you might be able to do this in other software as well. In the columns I've set up reminder dates so once this contract say it's really do it's up for renewal in January so I said okay I need to start looking at it in December. So December not only do I maybe put something on my calendar visual calendar but I'll get an email reminder prompted through this automated setting to review this contract so you could do that for different things like milestones if there's a person on your team Tim that needs to complete a certain task by a certain date you could set up a reminder from SharePoint. In order to do that, I wanted to put. I didn't want to create my own collaborative tool or instructions but there is a video that's really helpful on YouTube. As far as how to set up the reminders in SharePoint. So that's just a little trick that you could use in your toolkit as far as project management. Another thing I wanted to talk about just briefly is we also are starting to do more things like use charts in. Let me go back here really quick. So we have this shared folder in SharePoint for all staff and we have different projects going on in our different offices but also, you know just to be inclusive and help create buy in I like staff to have access to a lot of the work that we're doing to make decisions about software so we didn't just say from a high level we're going to do this and everyone disagrees that we should have picked that software perhaps. We have this folder in SharePoint that we're using and one of the things we're doing like I said is vetting the phone vendors. So, one of the things that I am attempting to do is use a Gantt chart from Excel. So you can go to Excel and get these kind of charts and pull them up and just customize it to your project. It will help you map time spent, how much is complete on a task, who the task is assigned to, a lot of different things. Honestly, I'm just starting to get familiar with this so I don't want to pretend I know everything about it but it's also another good collaborative tool you can use to show people the progress in your projects and different tasks in your projects. I think that might be all I have. Let me look at this. Yes. So, anyway, like Tim said again. A lot of these tools are very similar. So you can actually do a lot of the same things with like Slack or Teams or whatever it just really depends on what you have access to and what you, you know, want to use. And one thing I tell my staff like we had one of our phone vendors wanted to use Amazon Connect to meet and I know our staff is Satish knows how busy attorneys are at legal aid. They are so busy I just thought if they saw another platform that they had to learn. So I went back to the vendor and said hey can we use Google meets or something that people might be and they switched. So never, never have fear to ask people to switch gears a little bit if your staff are more comfortable using a tool and it won't take as much time for them to get engaged with your project. That's all I have. Thank you. Molly, that SharePoint looks really interesting. Did you move, when you moved from Basecamp, the old Basecamp, did you replace that with SharePoint or something else? You know, I don't even think, I think we were thinking we would use Microsoft Project. But honestly, the tech unit really only used Basecamp. So when we moved to SharePoint, we moved all our data from on-premise servers to the cloud. And then staff started talking about like Monday and Basecamp and, you know, Microsoft Project. So we're still kind of debating on what, what project management software we can use as a whole. But until we, we choose it, Teams and SharePoint do a pretty good job with the project management. Yeah, it looks awesome. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Okay, Satish. All right, so let me just jump in. Thank you, Tim and Molly for really, you know, carrying the bulk of the assignment in terms of planning a project and working on the project. And the tools that they have introduced are extremely helpful. So let me talk about my experience, which is only for four months now. I'm interested with my experience as a lawyer, and I'm going to be talking about tracking projects and how you keep a project going after the planning and working phase and make sure that everybody's on the same page. The legal model, and we're obviously talking about law firms, local services offices. The legal model for project management is either triage, like you're doing the thing that is most urgent right now to your client. It's a cut and run approach. So you're trying to do as little damage as you can, perhaps even improve the situation for your client or group of clients or for a legal issue. And sometimes it's just dodging issues like we can't do that, we don't have the bandwidth, we aren't funded to do that, we are restricted from doing that, and so on. So it's a much different approach to project management if you can even call it project management at all in the legal world. Success is graded on a pass fail basis. And most projects are done as soon as you know the decision from the judge comes down or the hearing officer, or the funding runs out or you've served a population or geographic area. You just have to get across the finish line and or meet a deadline of some kind. And the other thing about legal project management is that the results are out of your control. This is true for technology projects and all projects, probably in some way, but in the legal project management world. The results are determined by somebody else the judge hearing officer and elected official somebody else. And so you don't necessarily or shouldn't focus on the results. You should focus on just getting the work done. So the primary tech tools for a legal project are usually outlook. You know, that's a big one and it sounds so silly but email is still the primary way of communication for most lawyers. Probably these days a lot of people using slack or teams. But even five years ago, no one had heard of slack at legal aid. And we have 1800 employees in New York City. And we just started using teams, you know, during the pandemic. So these are very new concepts, the idea that we wouldn't email everyone all the time for every idea or update or requirement. We heard in Excel are very commonly used as project management tools in the legal world. And believe it or not, we would work on Excel documents, save them, email them. And then once we'd open a different version of that document, save that. And then we would have to cross reference the 16 different versions of Excel before we had SharePoint, in order to work on a document in collaboration. So when someone thought of using Google Docs or Google Sheets, the idea that was floated about that was that it wasn't secure, and that we could not use a third party, one that we did not have a license for, and that our license for Microsoft products included security. And whether that's true or not, that's the reality of project management tools in the legal world. So what were our communication methods while there were three primary ones yelling screaming and ranting. But basically, that's how it went, you know, you had a strict hierarchy, and in the private legal world, you know, we all have heard about law firm partners and, and the hierarchy of working in law firms and junior level associates being yelled at and screamed at. And that wasn't much different in my experience in, in, you know, large nonprofit law firms where there is a hierarchy. There is some elitism that's baked into the place you know where people went to school and who they clerked for and the quality of their writing would be judged, you know, based on those those factors whether it's warranted or not. Communication was not open, it wasn't transparent it wasn't free flowing. People were worried about being judged and criticized and fired or demoted or promoted and made partner or, you know, becoming a supervisor getting more responsibilities and so on. So the reasons of legal project management in this kind of model are, there's only one and that is the projects always get done, because they have to get done. You have a deadline you have a client. The judge is waiting for that brief. And so you get it done. The cons are that no one on the team wants to work together ever again after these projects. Four months ago I joined a tech company as I described and I'm learning now that a tech project is much different. So, first, what are we building we're building a process sometimes or a feature or tool, or an architecture that will be used reused replicated scaled. It's a big deal. It's a longer term vision and execution and follow through and modification, and so on and Tim and Molly have talked a lot about how you do all that stuff. But most legal organizations don't have experience doing this. So I'm glad that we're having this talk this presentation now to go through some of this stuff. So I'm borrowing from the LSN tap toolkit here. But as we track progress, I think there's three questions that should be asked. One is based on issues or risks that have been identified and you've really got to go into this and Tim talked about this. What are the obstacles. What do you foresee as coming up. And are there any goals or changes that would be added to the project. And ideally you want to iterate as you are working on the project, but the fear is that you lose track of the original purpose, or the new features kind of swallow hold the original intent and you're tasked with building. And this brings us to the next question which is, does the project need to change. And this idea of pivoting or changing course is a big one. And it requires communication and transparency and openness, and also all of the tools that have been described thus far, which allow you to change course and have all the data all the information that you need to do that. So what are the ways that you could do some of this work. If you're new to this kind of project management as I am right now. One is regularly scheduled meetings and reports. So communication communication communication. And this is something that even though you know lawyers and legal professionals are supposed to be good at. They aren't very good at it internally. They can communicate, you know in an oral argument or in a brief to an administrative law judge, but they're not as good at communicating with a associate paralegal, a manager, a client you know it's much more difficult, and that kind of communication is key. And identifying the risks and the issues. You can create a log and there's a sample log in the LSN tab materials in the toolkit on their website. And you can see what that log looks like you can download it. But the questions that you want to identify are, what are the known risks and issues. What are the unknown risks and a paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. What are the unknown unknowns, like what are the things that you could not even imagine coming up look let's try. Let's try to think of things. And you know what one of those things is COVID was one of those things that no one could see coming. The election of Donald Trump, not to get political like no one could see that coming. And so how do you plan for that well you really can't, but, you know to know that you're able to pivot and adapt if something like that happens is important. So please be open to it, communicate to the team that, you know you want to be able to change in case something drastic happens. And then the third thing is document the changes to the scope of project, and there's a tracker again on the LSN tab website. You can manage what's called scope creep to make sure that you're doing what you're intending to do. And you're not often a different place altogether from what your purpose was and doing that can be dangerous because people lose focus, they lose motivation. And ultimately the result is going to suffer as well. And to pivot is also an extremely difficult thing for lawyers to do. We are risk a burst. So if you're working a legal services organization to tell someone like that we're going to change something that we've been working on for a year is terrifying. We're not ready for that so you've got to bake that in and say there's a possibility that this is going to change, and hopefully it'll be a change for the better. And it'll be, you know, better able to deliver that purpose that we were intending to to get to. So, how do we. So what are the key takeaways here, and you know I'll wrap it up I don't have that much more. The first is, there's no substitute for clear vision transparency and communication. So, I think none of us would ever say that there is a tool that's going to solve the problems of vision transparency and communication. There will never be a tool that any tech companies going to come up with, or any platform that will solve for that so you've got to have that stuff down first you've got to have the idea and the vision. Before you're going to, you know, download a bunch of tools. One of the things that's interesting about my current organization is we have more tools than we have people who work there. We're going to onboard someone, it takes months just to give them all the credentials to get into all the tools that we're using. And we keep adding more tools because everybody's looking for that next tool that's going to solve the problem that's going to make this work easier. And unfortunately, there probably isn't such a tool it's really just we have to communicate. The method of communication isn't the answer. It's that we have to communicate. And so be very wary of that and I know that we introduced a lot of tools today to all of you, and they all have a purpose but they're not going to substitute for your vision, and you know your effort and your communication. So, one of the questions that arises sometimes is, how do you what's the key to tracking progress on a project like how do you know if you have balanced efficiency and completion with getting the proper feedback and buy in an input from the interested parties. And unfortunately, I don't think you'll ever know for sure. If you've got all of that baked in. But that's where you know the last stage of this comes in which is to iterate to go back to it to make sure that you're building in that feedback. So, don't be afraid to change. You know, Molly mentioned not being able to close a project sometimes, but that can also be a strength, like you can you can add to it you can build in feedback, as the role the rollout occurs as more and more people use the product, or the tool or the feature. You've really got to build that and be willing to go back to it. And again that's a real challenge for lawyers, you know they're not going to want to go back to something that's closed. We like to put it in a drawer, stamp it with a closed stamp and never think about it again. But that's not necessarily the best for project management in this context like we want to be able to improve it. We want to do changes as the world changes. We want to go back to it and build in that feedback and input and efficiency is another kind of key question. A lot of this stuff seems like it's inefficient. It seems like there's a lot of extra layers here of communication and process. But if you hit that sweet spot, you know it's going to pay off in the end. And hitting that sweet spot of of these layers of communication and feedback and structure. If you have a good vision and good communication will pay off 10 fold as the project kind of continues on. But it can seem like a lot of extra stuff. And that's the challenge and you have to be able to sell it to your team. You know, walking versus learning how to ride a bicycle learning how to ride a bicycle is really hard to do at first. But once you pick it up, you know you're going to go 10 times faster, and it's more fun. So that's the way we want to look at some of these things you know these tools are like bicycles, and a lot of legal services organizations are not even just why they're crawling right now. And you know they've got to get up to speed and hopefully some of these, these tools will help. So let's see what's what's left that's the end of my formal presentation is Ali back on. I am can you all hear me okay. Yes, yes, great. Well, thank you so much, all of you for like sharing your perspectives on, you know what enables effective collaboration on these legal services projects, and thinking about how it can further collaboration but also to not let the technology tool actually get in the way of collaboration so I think that's a really helpful point to definitely flag and I've heard all of you touch on that as well. I wanted to open it up to see if there are any questions that you know any of the speakers have for each other I know I learned quite a bit from each of you, and whether our audience members have any questions for our speakers. So I just wanted to clarify with with the city so the three items that you mentioned with clear vision transparency was the other communication. Okay, okay. I think, I think often we miss that about clear vision, because sometimes vision. And I'm not sure we how we, how we deal with this but, but vision can sort of change a little bit over time based on, even during the run up to the start of a project. Based on like conversations, but I feel like that transparency part helps to inform, right how that vision is is either created or adjusted, right. Yeah, and one thing that we didn't talk about is like how the funders impact the vision. Because we may have a clear vision but then you know LSC says XYZ or you know the Ford Foundation says something else and we have to like mold our vision into the money that's going to pay for the project. And without transparency like your team's gonna be like wait a minute like what's going on here how are we getting to this point when we started over here. So it's really difficult. And you know, one of you are both of you stress that being a project manager is extremely difficult. You're juggling so many things. And even being transparent can be extremely challenging very. Yeah, yeah, it's the level to which you know it's kind of for us in our, our phone project we've tried to be really transparent inclusive and get everyone to let us know what the features they think we need and you know then some of them think they need to be involved in the budgetary part of it but that might be a little too much knowledge, you know to share with them. So it's a balance in a way the transparency part I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah I think and you raise a really good point there to the situation I think there's probably no nonprofit personnel that doesn't deal with figuring out the balance of the strategy and vision driving funding, as opposed to funding sometimes driving, you know, which is not that that preferred method or the ideal method at all, you want to have that clear vision and then get funding to to achieve that vision but the reality of it is what you just, it's a real frustrating. Sometimes to I like the ways to teach talked about the unknown unknowns, you know, because sometimes the unknowns are are approached by perhaps a vendor is like not a big deal. But as you're approaching aspect of a project and you have some experience that the unknown can actually take a lot of time to solve, you might want to put that, you know, that time in your project timeline, like potentially this this could happen and somebody might say I mean this has happened with phone related projects before where we've done an upgrade and we've been told it won't disrupt service. It will only take an hour and seven hours later at eight o'clock at night I'm like yeah, okay. I remember how you know how you presented this to us and did the reality of situation is you just have to be prepared for those potential unknowns. I like the emphasis on that. And also sometimes you can, you can prep your staff by not emphasizing the word change instead of using different like the phone system upgrade sounds less you know anxiety provoking then we're changing the whole entire system you know you can help get staff ready for change by the way you present to them, you know, our staff almost went on strike about 15 years ago when we changed from word perfect to Microsoft Word. It was like, it was like a new language like people were outraged. That was a great way to wrap it up satish thank you. Yes, really, really good words in your presentation. I really appreciate your time and insight here. Thank you. Thanks you guys enjoyed it. Yes, take care.